SPRING/BREAK Art Fair
METAL, FOAM and LACE
Taylor Baldwin and Katarina Riesing
866 UN Plaza, NYC, Room W-2
March 5-11, 2019
PURCHASE WORK HERE: SPRING/BREAK
Metal, Foam & Lace presents the work of Taylor Baldwin and Katarina Riesing in an exhibition revealing the tensions between illusion and reality, object and history, and tinkering and mastery. With a high level of skill and attention to detail, both artists address the physicality of the body through their works acknowledging its hidden histories, anxieties, and dissonances.
Mixing natural history, science fiction, and objects imbued with personal and cultural histories, Taylor Baldwin combines a startling array of objects with a specific materiality from geodes and fossils to mop handles and discarded toothbrushes to make bold painterly installation-sized sculptures. Methodically documenting the various histories of the objects he embeds and uses as sculptural materials, he engages in a future-thinking archeology where disparate items with a wide range of histories and uses combine to create new hybridized forms referencing the human body, technology, and natural science. These grafted sculptures speak to both a past of accumulated objects with histories invented or real and to a potential anxious future of technological transformations.
Katarina Riesing’s paintings combine the delicate and ephemeral – silk, lace, embroidery, and lingerie - with the private unsightly and sometimes unsettling details of the body – various moles, folds of skin, veins, and unshaven parts. While the figures themselves are anonymously presented as sexualized torsos, butts, or crotches, these personal details are rendered with exacting detail revealing a radical reality to the hidden topography of body. In our idealized culture saturated with airbrushing, filters, and Photoshop, Katarina’s paintings reveal an intimate, honest, and playful approach to the body, its sexuality, and its imperfection.
Katarina and Taylor both question illusion and reality, the subject and its history with their respective works. With Taylor’s hyper-detailed fragmenting bodies, objects and their real or invented value come into play – his bodily forms are at once hyper-real, futuristic, and an amalgamation of past relationships to objects, actual or imagined. In Katarina’s work, the reality of the body’s flaws with its pimples, wrinkles, and folds is laid bare and rendered on luxurious silk illuminating a new truth to familiar sexualized forms. These works come together in Metal, Foam & Lace to offer an evocative and at times unsettling vision of the body and its history, insecurities, and hidden truths.
Taylor Baldwin (b. Tucson, AZ 1983) is an artist working primarily in sculpture, video, and installation. He received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2005 and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2007. He has been a resident at the Fine Arts Work Center, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, the Seven Below Arts Initiative, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 201 Baldwin has exhibited work at Conner Contemporary Gallery (Washington D.C.), Land of Tomorrow Gallery (Louisville, KY), and Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA) as well as in groups shows at the Queens Museum of Art (NY), Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art (Tucson, AZ), the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (Norfolk, VA), the Kentucky Museum of Arts and Craft (Louisville, KY) and Zürcher Gallery (New York, NY). He is currently based in Queens, New York.
Katarina Riesing was born in Knoxville, TN and now lives and works in Alfred, NY where she is an Assistant Professor of Foundations at Alfred University. She has shown nationally and internationally with recent shows in Boston, Illinois and New Orleans. Riesing was recently an artist in residence at the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Icelandic Textile Center and Cite International Artist Residency in Paris. Riesing’s silk paintings and embroideries play with patter and figuration that teeter on abstraction, zooming in to reveal intimate moments; both sexy and embarrassing - a too close look.
